Should a business requestion nofollow links from businesses it has commercial relationships with?
-
I am working for a motor homes company that works with a network of dealers.
Having just analysed the site I notice that dealers are sending links to the site - lots of them. They are all follow links and are freely given. ADDED: There are upwards of a million new affiliate backlinks and then a load of pretty normal freely given backlinks with dealers who have commission arrangements, etc., with the company on motorhome sales.
Now this doesn't feel right to me because even if it isn't purposefully manipulative, it may appear so because of clear commercial relationships between my client company and the dealer businesses.
So I will recommend nofollow althought the site will lose a huge number of backlinks as a result. What are your thoughts on this?
-
It is indeed. One the one hand, err on the side of caution - on the other, links are required, but with that many affiliate links, I would have though Google was ignoring them.
-Andy
-
Thanks for your feedback Andy - In this instance the site has a history of penalties, so perhaps more vulnerable. It's hard to know for sure, of course.
-
As a matter of course, I would tend to nofollow affiliate links, but I can't say I have ever seen a site penalised for having inbound affiliate links.
Unless there was a manual penalty or some other reason, I still wouldn't rush to nofollow them if all is working well.
-Andy
-
Hi Matt - thanks for feedback - my main concern is upwards of a million affiliate backlinks that have come in recently - they are live, unfortunately.
-
The site is performing fine and many of the backlinks are freely given - just a few - however they have started some major affiliate marketing work and I see the backlinks coming in are nofollow and there are lots of them.
To give you an example - the latest company linking has sent through over 1,100,000 follow links to a few pages on the website (mainly a calculator for financing the motorhome).
These are all follow links and I'm thinking 302 or nofollow would be far safer, yet they're all live right now. I believe the client did ask for nofollow tags but they weren't implemented correctly.
One problem is the site is so reliant on these follow backlinks from affiliates for its rankings - if I just march in there and implement nofollows it will hit organic rankings.
-
Hi Luke,
Google is smarter than ever when it comes to links, so if something is freely given and isn't advertising, I wouldn't necessarily be no-following all of these.
Have a read through Google's guidelines on what they suggest for no-following here.
How is the site actually performing? Are they ranking badly in Google? Is visibility low? Are there any manual penalties? Have the site recently undergone any big changes?
Lots of other questions to look at before rushing at links.
-Andy
-
Luke,
I feel like you are jumping the gun, here. Is your site ranking poorly that might suggest a penalty?
You said there are a huge amount of links. How many? What is the context/ location of the links? Do the linking sites have high spam scores?
I wouldn't rush but consider those questions before proceeding.
Matt
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Does building backlinks help improve Google rankings? If so which links work nowadays?
Hi Guys, Please only reply of you have real experience.... So as the title implies does building backlinks work in improving the rankings in Google? I know they are not on the same level as some are spammy, in blog networks etc but how about other backlinks that are of higher quality? If yes, what sorts of backlinks work nowadays in boosting rankings but not risking getting penalized? So should you build backlinks ongoing? If so how many per month? I have a real struggle trying to get backlinks on really high quality sites. Any advice? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz1 -
Canonicalize vs Link Juice
I recently wrote (but have not published) a very comprehensive original article for my new website (which has pretty much no domain authority). I've been talking to the publisher of a very high Domain Authority site and they are interested in publishing it. The article will include 2-3 follow backlinks to my website. My question is should I: Repost the article in my own site and then request a "rel=canonical" from the high authority site Not re-post the article on my own site and just collect the link juice from the high authority site Which would be better for my overall SEO? Assume in case 1) that the high authority site would add a rel=canonical if I asked for it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke20 -
1 business targetting multiple local locations
When researching a new client - I just came across a site in the same field which is ranking really well for all the local towns/cities/villages in the area. Each page for each town is a duplicate only changing out the town name (which appears 13 times on the page) - all pics and videos are the same. His url structure is along the lines of: budget-business-domain.com/budget-business-area/budget-business-town/ The domain was registered in 2012 - all backlinks are internal - anchor text is the same. I think it shouldn't be working.... but it is 😞 Why is this working?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | agua0 -
Is there a danger linking to and from one website too many times?
Basically my webdeveloper has suggested that instead of using a subfolder to create an English and Korean version of the site I should create two different websites and then link them both together to provide the page in English, or in Korean, which ever the case may be. My immediate reaction is that search engines may perceive this kind of linking to be manipulative, as you can imagine there will be a lot of links (One for every page). Do you think it is OK to create two webpages and link them together page by page? Or do you think that the site will get penalized by search engines for link farming or link exchanging. Regards, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CoGri0 -
Are these links bad for my results?
In the past we have requested links on multiple directories. Since we have seen a mayor drop (60% in traffic) in results around the pinquin update 24-26th of April. Our results have been slowly getting lower and lower in Google. Is it possible to tell if these links are in fact doing my site harm? Before the 26th of April it was easy to see that the results where benefiting from the submission to those directories. We did not have any messages in webmaster tools and reconsideration says "no manual spam action taken". What would be the best strategy to turn this around and go up again? A selection of the requested links can be found below. <colgroup><col width="266"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 2Hillz
| www.thesquat.org |
| www.directmylink.com |
| www.thegreatdirectory.org |
| www.submission4u.com |
| www.urlmoz.com |
| www.basoti.org |
| www.iwebdirectory.co.uk |
| www.freeinternetwebdirectory.com |
| addsite-submitfree.com |
| opendirectorys.com |
| www.xennobb.com |
| mdwerks.com |
| www.directoryfire.com |
| www.rssbuffet.com | To give a good view on the problem: The requested links anchors are mostly not in the native language of the directories. Thanks!0 -
Getting Credit for your own inbound links
Good afternoon, I have been comparing competitors with the Open Site Explorer looking at their inbound links. I have noticed that they have been getting credit for their own inbound links within their site. Is there something I am doing wrong as inbound links on my site aren't getting found? Could this have anything to do with Webmaster tools? Thanks in advance, SEO_123
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TWPLC_seo0 -
Are there tools out there to determine when a link linked to your site? I want to know when a link farm was done a site.
In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links. The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done. I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out. Does anyone know how to find this out?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StrategicEdgePartners0